Marcello A. Mannino is a research scientist at the Department of Human Evolution of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where he collaborates in the management of the archaeological science laboratories. He is interested in human palaeoecology and, specifically, in the reconstruction of past environments, subsistence, diet and mobility. He is currently investigating human dietary change from the late Middle Palaeolithic, through the Upper Palaeolithic, and to the early Neolithic by means of stable isotope analyses (C, N, S, O, Sr) on skeletal remains of Neanderthals and Modern Humans.

Marcello started working at the Max Planck Institute after being awarded a Marie Curie Intra-European Research Fellowship (7th European Community Framework Programme, grant number PIEF-GA-2008-219965) for the project: Stable Isotope Ecology of Hunter-Gatherers in Italy in the Late Pleistocene and the Early Holocene. In this research, a range of isotope analyses (C, N, S) were applied to human and animal bone collagen from late Pleistocene and early Holocene sites of the Italian Peninsula and Sicily. This work has improved our understanding of the subsistence of prehistoric humans living around the Mediterranean Sea, by demonstrating for example that marine resources were not important foods in the diet of Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers (PLoS ONE; for media coverage on this research see New York Times and Spiegel Online Wissenschaft).

The research for Marcello’s doctoral thesis and for his post-doctoral fellowships at the Institute of Archaeology - University College London (United Kingdom) involved the development of methods for the study of shells of marine molluscs in archaeology. Marcello has investigated faunal assemblages from archaeological sites in the United Kingdom, Italy, Tunisia, Greece, Lebanon and Qatar. He has conducted oxygen isotope analyses on shells of marine molluscs from Upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic sites to reconstruct the seasonality of shellfish exploitation by prehistoric hunter-gatherers and early agro-pastoralists, as well as the territoriality and settlement systems of these human groups. This work has been published in peer-reviewed periodicals, such as: Antiquity, Archaeometry, Geo-Marine Letters, Journal of Archaeological Science, Quaternary International and World Archaeology.